In the Point/Counterpoint section of the October issue of Chest, two pairs of authors spar over whether fever should be controlled in sepsis by either pharmacological or external means. Readers of this blog may recall this post wherein I critically appraised the Schortgen article on external cooling in septic shock that was in AJRCCM last year. Apparently that article made a more favorable impression on some practitioners than it did on me, as the proponents of cooling in the Chest piece hang their hats on this article (and their ability to apply physiological principles to medical therapeutics). (My gripes with the Schortgen study were many, including a primary endpoint that was of little value, cherrypicking the timing of the secondary mortality endpoint, and the lack of any biological precedent for manipulation of body temperature improving mortality in any disease.)Reading the Point and Counterpoint piece (in addition to an online first article in JAMA describing a trial of induced hypothermia in severe bacterial meningitis - more on that later) allowed me to synthesize some ideas about the epistemology (and psychology) of medical evidence and its evaluation that I have been tossing about in my head for a while. Both the proponent pair and the opponent pair of authors give some background physiological reasoning as to why fever may be, by turns, beneficial and detrimental in sepsis. The difference, and I think this is typical, is that the proponents of fever reduction: a.) seem much more smitten by their presumed understanding of the underlying physiology of sepsis and the febrile response; b.) focus more on minutiae of that physiology; c.) fail to temper their faith in application of physiological principles with the empirical data; and d.) grope for subtle signals in the empirical data that appear to rescue the sinking hypothesis.
